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Alexandre Zougman
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Alexandre Zougman
@AZougman
Biochemist, medic, inventor. Personal account
Leeds, UK Katılım Şubat 2022
488 Takip Edilen154 Takipçiler

Однажды, когда Эйвор была мелкой, у нас состоялся разговор с соседкой в лифте:
— она из приюта?
— да
— а что там, красивых не было собак?
— а это некрасивая собака?
— ну не очень. У моих детей корги, вот корги красивый.
Я до сих пор с этой соседкой не здороваюсь.

картошчка@kartoshch
как живется людям которые называют уродливым КОТА
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Alexandre Zougman retweetledi

I’m a disbeliever in accidental discoveries (at least, in biology). Whenever I’ve looked into one, the story turns out to be false.
The most famous is penicillin – supposedly, the fungi wafted in through a window, fell into a petri dish of cultured staphylococci, and suppressed the bacteria’s growth.
But in a recent article (asimov.press/p/penicillin-m…), @kevinsblake explains that doesn’t really work (grown staphylococci aren’t affected by penicillin; it only works if introduced before the bacteria begin growing); plus, Fleming’s notes on the discovery provide very little detail and the specific results he described couldn’t be replicated by other scientists (even though penicillin does work against staphylococci when introduced correctly.)
There are more: Pasteur’s supposedly accidental discovery of a chicken cholera vaccine was more likely the result of systematic work by his then-assistant, Émile Roux. (jstor.org/stable/2332836…)
And, as @NikoMcCarty writes, the discovery of GFP, nanopore sequencing, and optogenetics are also often described as accidents, but none of them happened that way either. nikomc.com/2026/04/01/opt…
People love serendipity, so why am I bursting their bubble?
I don’t think this is limited to accidental discoveries; I think many historical science anecdotes are highly embellished:
- Edward Jenner didn’t deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine (he used variolation); and he wasn’t the first to try using cowpox bsky.app/profile/scient…
- Cobra catching bounties in British India didn’t lead to a rise in the number of snakebites, and there was only hearsay evidence that cobras were bred in response at all twitter-thread.com/t/169650089580…
- Barry Marshall didn’t develop stomach ulcers from drinking a concoction of H. pylori (he did develop gastritis though…) cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/upl…
- No one knows who actually found the highly-productive strain of penicillin on a cantaloupe, but it probably wasn’t 'Moldy Mary' scientificdiscoveries.ars.usda.gov/tellus/stories…
But in this case it irks me for an additional reason – it gives the impression that innovation happens sporadically, by chance, when there are actually ways that we can systematically speed it up – such as better funding, institutions and incentives.
So: are there any true accidental discoveries that hold up to scrutiny?
English

@AZougman Ради этого стоило бы перебраться в Японию
Русский

После прихода Берии начались неприятности - за "превышение полномочий" был арестован его коллега-палач Михаил Матвеев - и 14.03.1939. Поликарпов от страха застрелился. И зря, кстати - Матвеева в начале войны вернули из лагеря в органы, умер на пенсии
nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/%D0%… 4/4
Русский

True. And that’s about 2 pounds (there’s about 4 pounds of nitrogen in the average person) of nitrogen that was originally fossil fuels.
Most of us are alive because of 3 men:
Haber, Bosch, and Norman Borlaug.
The book is a great story of the different ways of dealing with existential threats.

English

40-50% of the nitrogen atoms in the human body ultimately come from synthetic nitrogen fertilisers (produced via the Haber-Bosch process).
Peter Waddell@dburner996
Every 1 million tonnes of lost urea production in the world in 2026 reduces grain production by 7-8 million tonnes. A sobering thought.
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@merimarimore — Но ведь мне аптекарь говорил, что это будет радикально черный цвет. Не смывается ни холодной, ни горячей водой, ни мыльной пеной, ни керосином… Контрабандный товар!
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@umerenno Хлорид кобальта, наоборот, в сухом состоянии - синий, а в водном растворе - розовый.
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